1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to entertainment systems, and, more particularly, to entertainment systems that are operated in environments in which a user's attention is diverted to another primary task.
2. Description of the Related Art
Entertainment systems are known to include radios as well as playback devices such as compact disc (CD) players. Listening to music on the radio is a typical example of how using an entertainment system is highly dependent on personal preferences. People prefer to listen to radio stations that play the music they like. Similarly, they tune to stations that broadcast the news they are interested in. Tuning to a station can be seen as a very simple approach to personalizing a radio. A more advanced type of personalization would be to configure the station preset pushbuttons of a radio with a user's most favorite stations.
If more radio stations become available, the task of presetting or tuning to stations becomes increasingly complex. Nowadays, in addition to regular AM/FM stations, there are a great number of stations available on satellite radio, digital broadcast radio, and on the internet as IP radio streams. Finding the stations with interesting content demands more time and attention from the user since it is still a manual task that requires active input from the user.
A few attempts have been made to make it easier for the user to find music that he likes. Approaches such as www.Last.FM and Amazon.com use collaborative filtering technology that compares the relationship between different items such as songs based on user behavior. For example, persons that like to listen to artists such as Coldplay often also like to listen to similar pop music artists such as U2.
State of the art entertainment systems use different approaches for selecting content. Radios provide functions to find stations on different radio frequency bands. The user can use a seek function to find all the available radio stations in the area to decide which he is interested in. Some radios equipped with RDS (radio data system) offer a function that seeks for the next station that broadcasts a specific program type (PTY). This requires radio stations to transmit the correct RDS information.
Selection of music in CDs or CD changers is done by first selecting the CD, then manually selecting the track. The track is identified by either a number or a name if the CD contains the names of the songs by using the CD Text feature.
State of the art media players such as Apple's IPOD or Philips' STREAMIUM often use one of the following approaches for selection of music, podcasts and other audio content in, for example, mp3 format or movies in digital files: selection of options that are provided in a list; “random” playback; or “recommended” playback. The selection in lists is a common approach to allow the user to navigate through the content until the desired item is found. Many variations to this approach exist, such as displaying images representing the content (cover art, thumbnails), or using lists that are sorted by a variety of criteria (e.g., alphabetically, frequency of use, user interest). If the media collection is too large to allow for quick selection from a single list, a typical approach is to use a hierarchy of selection criteria. For example, in order to find a song from a particular artist, the user first selects the music genre, then the artist, the album, and finally the song. Thus, a range of decisions is required by the user in order to specify what media content he is interested in. In contrast, “random” playback requires no input from the user at all but the user leaves the selection of media content entirely to the media player. To mitigate this effect, “recommended” playback is becoming more popular. This playback technology still chooses the music automatically but takes into account the interest of the user in order to maximize playback of items the user prefers. A range of portable audio and video players make use of such recommendation technologies in order to offer personalized content to the user.
Both approaches, “random” and “recommended” playback, do not give the user direct influence on the items that will be selected next. If the user wants to be more specific or wishes to create a sequence of items, i.e., a playlist, he will have to use a list based approach again to specify in more or less detail what he would like.
Unless the user wants to leave all the control of selecting media items to an automated system, there must be some way for the user to express his interest. Expressing interest by using lists or its many variations involves a lot of decision making by the user. For example, the user has to decide what music category he is interested in. Then he has to specify the artists he is interested in. This works well as long as the user has a specific idea of what he is interested in. However, it does not work well if the user cannot decide on a specific category or does not know what categories an item belongs to. For example, the separation between the music genres “Rock” and “Pop” is not clearly defined and often depends on subjective criteria. So, if the user is interested in music that is somewhat in-between “Rock” and “Pop”, this wish cannot be expressed in currently available media players which require the user to choose either “Rock” or “Pop”. Decisions like this will have to be made in every step of the hierarchy until the user has found what he is interested in. This decision making process might be costly in environments where the user cannot spend a lot of attention and time on the media player or is not willing to. An example is entertainment systems in a vehicle. Because the user needs to focus on the driving task, the selection of media items needs to be done as quickly and with as few interaction steps as possible.
A media map is a graphical representation of media content available to a media player. This content can be stored on the media player itself or acquired from external storage devices such as flash memory cards or web services. In addition, content can be used from sources such as broadcast or streaming, for example, from radio stations.
In one known approach to creating a media map, music characteristics are extracted from audio content using Rhythm Histograms and Statistical Spectrum Descriptors. The resulting feature vectors are converted into a two-dimensional graphical representation using a Self Organizing Map. A property of the resulting map is that it preserves the topological properties of the input space. The resulting map reflects the input, but the creation process does not provide direct control over the visual appearance. For this reason, the Self Organizing Map might not display the music genres in a structured manner.
What is neither disclosed nor suggested in the art is a personalized entertainment system that overcomes the problems and limitations described above. More particularly, what is neither disclosed nor suggested is an entertainment system that graphically and spatially indicates to the user the available content, and that enables the user to select content via spatial hand gestures such as points, lines, and closed loops.